Tag: west berlin

What sparked more than 100 West Berliners to climb over the wall to the Communist East was a dispute over the fate of the Lene Dreieck, 40,000 square meters of mud and shrubs directly bordering the wall in the one-time center of pre-war Berlin. In the 1920s this area near the Potsdamer Platz was one of the most frenzied parts of Berlin, with packed cafes that housed much of the literary community in winters when coal was short. Nearby was the bunker where Hitler took his life on April 30, 1945. Technically a part of the Soviet sector, the razed, overgrown area was one of the many chunks of land that the masons of East Berlin didn’t manage to wrap in when the wall went up on August 13, 1961. Like leftover pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the bits lay